Muses

Though few in number, admittedly, my favourite female writers are all mad-looking pensioners with cardigans and cats. Go figure.

Ugly words

misshapen
synedoche
tidbit (yes, Yanks, 'titbit' sounds sillier, but it looks less stupid)

Up/down

These days are the price we pay for the other days.

Hemingways: 3

I wrote six words before breakfast!

InDefinition - 24

quackery, n. training school for young oboists.

Hemingways: GUEST ENTRY (Jesus)

Pick up thy bed and walk.

Hemingways: 2

Been there. Done that. Got dengue.

Good form!

I cry with laughter at my own jokes. Seriously.

InDefinition - 23

hip-hopotamous, adj. hung like a gangsta from the East River.

InDefinition - 22

Umbrel-La, n. Pr. mythical place where thirsty bedouin go when they die. Near Scotland. (cf. 'Center Parcs')

InDefinition - 21

plus-two-by-fours, n. rudimentary wooden legs (woodimentary prostheses)

InDefinition - GUEST ENTRY

eschewed, adj. not chewed, i.e. dietarily verboten.

- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Five Dials 16

An 18-page Christmas card from Hamish Hamilton, now with added haiku scansion errors.

Finding your (African) horn

Previously well-known onomatopoeic instrument makes it onto list of 'new words', 2010 (thanks to fucking football).

Literal failure (or, Excerpts from my Autobiography, by Some Other Bloke)

He was trapped in a rut between journalism and meagre scraps of prose. Short stories were the best he could do. Very short, too short to make a living from, even if he got paid for them...

They had been amazingly fickle, his muses. Or he had been at fault for picking such unreliable ones.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin

Hip-hop as poetry?

Jay-Z = Heaney. Discuss.

I like

the New Yorker's style guide for diphthongs like coöpting, naïve and deëmphasize.* Full marks for clarity - even if it does look a little weird.

* in't that one brilliant?

La bete humaine v. homo loquax

The whole business exudes irony so rich you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan.

- Tom Wolfe on Zola, et al., the 2006 Jefferson Lecture

It seems to me

To be a great artist you need solitude. To be a successful artist you need friends.

A relationship

... two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

- Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin